Grace Slick’s artistic odes to ‘Alice in Wonderland’
In 1967, Grace Slick captured the essence of an entire scene with ‘White Rabbit’. Thematically exploring the whimsical, psychedelic nature of one of the most familiar children’s stories of all time, it rattled the rock scene with unexpected poise, turning heads with a sound that sounded as foreboding as revolutionary.
As Slick later said, “Why it got so popular is amazing because it’s not rock ‘n’ roll. It is a Spanish march. The music is weird.”
Although Jefferson Airplane no doubt redefined the counterculture scene of the decade, it was Slick’s tenacity and attitude that pushed it further with music that surprised all those who came across it expecting the same familiar rhythms of mainstream rock ‘n’ roll. Like ‘White Rabbit’ – more than just a “Spanish march”, it expressed the frayed corners of societal unease, drumming up the kind of unsettled malaise present through mose communities at the tail-end of a decade suddenly in the throes of uncertainty.
As far as source material goes, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass were the perfect springboard, thematically exploring the underbelly of survival through the fantastical realms of escapism, where society is built on the bones of cognitive dissonance and strangely sinister childlike wonder. For Slick, ‘White Rabbit’ was for all parents who fed lies to their children about what not to do, particularly if they were hypocritical themselves.
“They’d read us all these stories where you’d take some kind of chemical and have a great adventure,” she told Q. “Alice in Wonderland is blatant; she gets literally high, too big for the room, while the caterpillar sits on a psychedelic mushroom smoking opium. In the Wizard of Oz, they land in a field of opium poppies, wake up and see this Emerald City. Peter Pan? Sprinkle some white dust-cocaine on your head and you can fly.”
She also explained how it was Alice’s curiosity that was the main essence of the story, something that could have easily been a saving grace just as much as a downfall: “I don’t know who Alice is – I have never known exactly who she is, but her own curiosity will always be her focus,” she said. Perhaps this is why the concept extended beyond the song and into Slick’s own artwork, the white rabbit becoming something she’d visit repeatedly in her minimalist works, the colours and harsh lines emanating a surrealist quality felt in the song, albeit in a more starkly visual manner.
There’s also a familiar energy there, almost akin to the crescendoing line “feed your head” in the song, though peering from the art like it’s almost taunting, sitting poised with an expression that teeters on warm and unsettling. It also stands confidently, a bit like the mantra of curiosity that means if you’re not ready to immerse yourself, you’ll be left by the wayside, glared at with the eyes of an all-knowing white rabbit until, finally, you succumb.
But maybe that was the purpose of ‘White Rabbit’ all along. Slick saw inspiration in a story that grabbed children and misled them about a world filled with uncertainty, beckoning them to safety through the artifice of another hidden world where things made more sense because it was built on nonsense. But in 1967, when any semblance of comprehensive direction began falling apart in the music world, it’s all anybody had left to hold onto.
